For this Week’s essay of the week we bring you a post by the Ape Man. Frankly, it is more of a rant then an essay, but it is late at night and we are desperate to meet the deadline. Besides, it is long enough to be an essay even if the quality of the idea is not up to snuff.
This from a blog called Live a Life Worthy…..
So Jeremiah went over the things that they are suppose to do in a fire…the basics that you learn in kindergarten but they were never taught it. One of the things was, “Stay and hold the door open while all your kids get out of the class then follow them” one of the teachers said, “Honestly, if there is a fire…I’m going to leave my kids and get out of the school” my mom and I just looked at each other thinking, how can this teacher leave thirty 2nd graders and run out the door. My mom turned the teacher next to her and said, “Would she really do that??” and she said, “Of course, she is much more important than the children, she has a husband and a family”
Live a Life Worthy is written by missionary lady who teaches in northern Iraq (though the above was actually written by one of her friends). I quote the above section because I think it provides an interesting insight into the Iraqi culture.
In America everyone would have proclaimed that would have done their up most to take care of the kids first. When push comes to shove, that might not always be the case, but we all feel obliged to pretend. In Iraq, that pretense is apparently not necessary.
I don’t know that this should really be taken as an example of the relative moral quality of Kurds vs Americans though. I just bet that there are different things that Kurds feel obliged to live up to. For example, if you posed a scenario were you had state how much hospitality to give a wandering stranger, I think you would find that the Kurds would profess to more “moral” where as the Americans would come off as more selfish.
That is just a guess though. I have only ever met one Kurd in my life and he got busted for drug dealing.
Sometimes the good old US starts to seem like an awfully nice place live. Take this story from the The Sentinel (a U.K paper) (h/t Brussels’s Journal)…
Four heroin addict prisoners received thousands of pounds in compensation last year after being forced to go cold turkey. Two inmates at Stafford Prison, one at Sudbury Open Prison and one at Dovegate, near Uttoxeter, were each paid £3,807.
What happens if an alcoholic gets thrown into prison? Can they sue if they don’t get a beer?
You have to feel sorry for the police officers who are working in that kind of environment. Especially as they seem to be understaffed.
If you don’t have your head in the sand, you know that there is a big offensive underway in Iraq. One of the first reporters on scene is Michael Yon and you can find his first report here. Not much info so far, but I would keep an eye on his site if you are interested in the details of this offensive as it unfolds.
Also, check out this story by Michael Yon. Not because of how it relates to the war, but because of the portrait he gives of a modern Bedouin.
Gazprom has asked the Russia government to cancel already issued contracts to sell gas to China. This from the BBC….
Russian energy giant Gazprom has asked the government to cancel an agreement to pipe large quantities of gas to China from fields in Siberia.
Alexander Ananenkov, the group’s deputy chief executive, said plans to deliver 80bn cubic metres of gas a year to China would leave Russia short.
Needless to say, these are not Gazprom contracts that Gazprom wants canceled. Exxon Mobile, Rosneft, and Videsh own the field that was to ship the gas to China. That makes me wonder about Gazprom supposed justification. If the contracts are torn up, it means that the gas has to be sold to Gazprom (because they are the ones that supply the domestic Russian market). So is Russia really running out of gas, or is Gazprom just making another power play to seize someone else’s assets?
I would go for the latter theory in a heartbeat accept for the fact that Rosneft is owned by the Russian government and Videsh is owned by India(who is generally considered an important Russian ally, though one wonders if this still holds true). So Gazprom’s proposal is going to make India and China mad as well as hurt a company owned by the Russian government. That seems like a lot of trouble to cause for the production of just one gas field.
Maybe Russia really is running short on gas.
This is the latest story to get all those bears out their excited (from DealBreaker.com)…
In case you missed it this weekend, Merrill seized $400mm in assets from a Bear Stearns hedge fund and is auctioning them off starting today. The Ralph Cioffi led fund scrambled to avoid liquidation late last week, auctioning off over $4bn worth of bonds Thursday morning alone, culminating a protracted struggle to sell assets to stay afloat. The fund has sold $7bn worth of bonds since May and frozen redemption requests.
Also, pay attention to the last line in this little news story….
The Bear fund originally raised $600mm in investor capital and borrowed $6bn from banks to bet the wrong way on the ABX.
When you are leveraged 10 to 1 making a mistake hurts. But it hurts your bankers more. After all, guys running the fund have already been paid and investors only invested 600 million. But the banks are on hook for 6 billion dollars.
That is why I think Merrill moved to pull the plug. They probably hoped that if got out first they could leave the banks holding bag. But it has not turned out to be that simple for Merrill (this from Reuters)…
Merrill is delaying selling the assets until it hears the troubled hedge fund’s plan to recapitalize, the network reported. Merrill and Bear are expected to discuss the plan on Monday or Tuesday, CNBC said.
Calculated Risk speculated over in the comments on his blog that Merrill did not like the price that they were going to get if they sold the Bear collateral at a fire sale. He thinks that this is why they are having second thoughts.
Myself, I wonder if this does not have more to do with one division of Merrill saying to the other, “hey, if you make Bear go down you are going to take us down with them.” After all, it was just this February that Merrill was spending big money trying to catch up with Bear Stearns (this from Bloomberg this February)….
Merrill Lynch & Co. Chief Executive Officer Stanley O’Neal was willing to lose $230 million to catch Bear Stearns Cos. and the shakeout is just beginning.
That’s because Merrill is determined to capture a dominant share of trading in bonds backed by home loans, the fastest- growing debt market since 1995 and this year’s most troubled. O’Neal’s enthusiasm for mortgages to potentially delinquent borrowers coincides with the highest default rate in more than six years, a record contraction in demand for so-called subprime loans and descending bond prices.
Merrill already has bankrolled two home lenders that subsequently failed and purchased a third, First Franklin Financial Corp., for $1.3 billion, just before HSBC Holdings Plc disclosed that its bad-loan provisions increased 20 percent because of the unraveling U.S. subprime market.
Now running hedge fund that bets on a bond market is different then trading bonds on the market. Still, I can imagine a scenario where some Merrill bond traders might be telling their bosses that if the Bear’s hedge fund goes down, they go down. That is the fun of modern financial markets. Everyone is dependent on everyone else, even their rivals.
Of course, all that is only speculation. In fact, nobody even seems to no for sure why or how the Bear hedge fund got into trouble or even how much trouble they are really in (though if you are facing margin calls, you obviously have problems). Felix has a good overview of the problem over at his blog. I will only quote the last to paragraphs because they are the most deliciously ironic….
Finally, of course, there’s the possibility that Bear’s Cioffi was forced to cover his short positions on the way up from 62 to 72, and incurred a lot of losses in May, rather than during the more recent move back south. With his ABX short covered, he found himself long the market at its highs, just as the market was set to take another tumble. And with his short-covering losses spurring redemptions, he found himself unable to get out of his long positions in a bear market without suffering even bigger losses. In other words, he lost money on the way up and then lost even more money on the way down.
This is all speculation, of course, and even Bear Stearns itself is probably unclear on some of this: otherwise it wouldn’t have had to alter its official April results from a loss of 6.5% to a loss of 19%. Besides, officials at Bear probably have bigger problems on their hands right now than explaining to journalists exactly what went wrong and how. Still, this is already a salutary case: a hedge fund seems to have managed to go bust by making bearish bets in a down market. Leverage can have that effect, if you’re not careful, or if you’re unlucky.
Edit 6/19/07: Merrill listened to Bear’s plan to get out of their troubles and—drum roll please– decided to sell Bear’s collateral anyway. See this blog post from Calculated Risk.
Good poetry can be prophecy. A poet can capture what he does not know and foretell the future better then any pundit. One good example of poetry as prophecy would be William Butler Yeats’ famous poem “THE SECOND COMING.” When you think about when this poem was written and what happened in the two decades after it was written, it is hard to escape the feeling that you are reading a scarily accurate work of prophecy.
The sad part is that William Yeats welcomed the coming of the beast.
I have had occasion to think about this poem along with King Lear and the current intergenerational problems that I perceive to be coming.
In this rant, The EU Referendum wonders why the European council of ministers has over ruled the European Union’s high court and put The People’s Mujahideen of Iran on its list of terrorist organizations. After all, The People’s Mujahideen of Iran opposes the Iranian government and supposedly most European governments would like to see the government in Iran change. So why are they overruling their own courts to call it a terrorist organization?
This week’s essay of the week is all about Shakespeare’s King Lear. I like the play so much that any half way decent essay on it is bound to catch my attention.
I just can’t see buying most gadgets that are designed with pets in mind. They all seem like such a waste of money.
But I have to admit that I can see the appeal of buying a Cat Cam.
For those who have not heard about it, A Cat Cam is a digital camera that is strapped to the collar of a cat. It on a time controller and it takes pictures from the cat’s perspective as often as you want (from one second to every eight hours). Thus, you can get a pretty good idea of what your cat has been up to if you so desire.
This is one of the trips that a cat named Mr. Lee took. Unfortunately, the author heavily edited the selection of photos so you don’t get quite as detailed view of Mr. Lee’s trip as I would like. But it is still cool.
The Cat Cam is not really ready for the market yet, but I can see it becoming a big thing. Who has not wondered what the cats are getting up to when they are out and about?